Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Tej Kohli congratulates Bing on beating Yahoo! in the US internet search.

In round one of the battle of the search engines, “Bing” defeated “Yahoo”, marking a historic win!

Bing's bounce over Yahoo in the US search volume should not come as a surprise to anyone who has been following the horse race, but it is a iconic milestone for a small search engine whose major directive is to grab some of the Google's advertising pie.

Throwing Yahoo out of the way, Bing's dream of giving a real competition to Google becomes a little less far-fetched. Bing, together with windows Live and MSN now have 13.9 percent share of all search queries. While Yahoo's share fell to 13.1%, Google still rules the roost with whopping 65.1% share. However, by other metrics, Bing is still at the third position.

Eventually though, the competition is only interesting in the way it inspires competitors to come up with new features and services. The battle between Google and Bingo will play out in three venues:

Basic Search

The recent launch of Google Instant tool by Google, which shows and alters search results as you type, is one example of how search engines will try to trump one another in order to make themselves stand out. The ultimate search results are somewhat same when separated from their interfaces, but there no mistaking Google from the pack now. Whether bingo will follow the footsteps of Google or will do something innovative on its own, is yet to be seen!

Extra Features

It's a pain to use different search engines for different services, hence, it falls upon Google and Bingo to develop the most attractive all-encompassing service that include maps, images and other things apart from the traditional search. Of late, Google has strengthened its real-time search engine to pull better results from Facebook and Twitter. Likewise, Bing has introduced streaming music, games and movie information to its search results. Recently, Bing also updated its Maps to include Cab fare calculator and support for OpenStreetMap.

Mobile

Google has a strong foothold when it comes to mobile searches, since it's a default search engine for iPhone and of course Android. But Bing might get a boost with the launch of Windows Phone 7, along with the Bing's iphone and Android apps. Besides this, the compulsory use of Bing in the Verizon's latest Fascinate phone might not be received well by Google fans, but it will give Bing another helping hand, although forcibly.

Monday, September 6, 2010

Google agrees to Pay $8.5m to settle a Lawsuit brought over their social networking tool Buzz.

Launched in February this year, Buzz automatically enrolled all Gmail users into a social network based around their contacts.

Initially, the service didn't receive any good reviews due to users having little control over who could see or not see their network of contacts.

Many Gmail users took google to court over Buzz claiming that the network violated their privacy.

The lumpsum is at the centre of Google proposed settlement of the legal case, out of which 30% will cover the cost of legal fee , the seven Gmail users who filed the lawsuit will get $2,500 each and the remained will be split among organizations that promote online privacy.

The settlement also requires Google to do more to educate people about the privacy aspects of Buzz. The settlement has yet to win approval from the federal judge overseeing the case.

The initial rash of complaints about Buzz forced Google to bring in changes that made it an opt-in service and gave users control over who they maintain contact with.